Using customer ideas to help develop realistic and appealing new products

Crowd sourcing can produce a rich pool of exciting product concepts, as the unfettered thinking and creative time that consumers enjoy means that they often come up with more innovative designs. Plus you’re getting NPD ideas that the consumers themselves have already endorsed as a good concept. But how do you balance desirable innovation against keeping the ideas realistic, and how do you spot the winning ideas? The answer is by combining crowd-sourcing, co-creation and standardised product testing.

Using crowd-sourcing in technology NPD

A recent crowd-sourcing study, run by GfK NOP in partnership with co-creation community eYeka.com, recently asked consumers to imagine their “ideal communication technology of the future”. Participants had the freedom to create a new device, a new service for an existing device, a piece of software or an application. Their solution could be designed to make their lives easier, more fulfilling, more productive, or just more fun – the only limit was that it had to be something that could conceivably exist in the next five years.